"Mr. Rudin defended his actions in a
brief statement, saying, “As stewards of the performance rights of Aaron
Sorkin’s play, it is our responsibility to enforce the agreement we
made with the Harper Lee estate and to make sure that we protect the
extraordinary collaborators who made this production.”
But
he also blamed the situation on the Dramatic Publishing Company, which
is run by Christopher Sergel III, Mr. Sergel’s grandson, saying it had
erred in issuing licenses to present the play to theaters that should
not have received them. Mr. Rudin has argued that a 1969 agreement
between Ms. Lee, the author of the novel, and Dramatic Publishing bars
productions by theaters within 25 miles of a city that in 1960 had a
population of more than 150,000 people, as well as productions using
professional actors, when a “first-class” production is running on
Broadway or on tour.
“We have been
hard at work creating what I hope might be a solution for those theater
companies that have been affected by this unfortunate set of
circumstances, in which rights that were not available to them were
licensed to them by a third party who did not have the right to do so,”
Mr. Rudin said. “In an effort to ameliorate the hurt caused here, we are
offering each of these companies the right to perform our version of
‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Aaron Sorkin’s play currently running on
Broadway.”...
“Unfortunately
this issue has been the shot heard ’round the fine arts world over
recent days,” said Davis Varner, the president of the board of the
Theater of Gadsden, a community theater in Alabama that is planning to
stage the Sergel version this month. The theater is not near a big city,
so its rights appear to be unchallenged, but Mr. Varner issued a
statement referring to Mr. Rudin as “the bully from Broadway” and said,
“I am saddened and disappointed for those groups who have been forced to
cancel their productions through no fault of their own.”
Others took to social media to vent their unhappiness.
As great as the new version on Broadway is, Scott Rudin's strongarming of local theater companies to shut down their versions of To Kill a Mockingbird seems repressive and anti-art.— david maraniss (@davidmaraniss) March 1, 2019"
